On 8 October 2025, Niyazi Sayın died.
He was a man of many talents and known by many titles.
A master of classical Turkish music.
The greatest virtuoso of the instrument called ney.
An ebru artist.
A photographer.
A painter.
And, perhaps less famously… My father.
Silence Louder than Words
Funerals have always been strange to me.
Some people attend to prove that they loved the deceased.
Some come out of a sense of duty.
Others arrive for the performance of it all… Public grief, private relief.
I was there because he was my father.
The Artist and the Man
Many things can be said about my father. Many can be debated.
But there’s little doubt he was the greatest ney master who ever lived.
His style was incomparable, unmistakable, and entirely his own.
For those unfamiliar with his art, let me put it this way:
He was a cross between Mark Knopfler, Jimi Hendrix, and Guthrie Govan, but on ney.
Imagine all three rolled into one… then imagine something else entirely.
Something that cannot be imagined.
That was him.
Nothing is Divine. Everything is Human
We are always too eager to bestow divinity upon fellow humans.
All too soon we forget that divinity isn’t ours to grant.
We forget that men are mortal, fragile, fallible and far from perfection.
He was a great artist. One who will probably never be forgotten.
He had his own style in everything.
But he was also, in many ways, an ordinary human being just like any of us.
He certainly wasn’t flawless.
And I suppose I’m the living proof of that.
What do you think of this article?
